Being a woman in today’s society is not easy, as the concept of what is considered “attractive” has dramatically changed over the years. I have a unique perspective on this because I work for a bathing suit company. Women would tell me everything that they didn’t like about their bodies. They were too fat or too thin. They didn’t like their stomach or their hips or their legs, and all day long, I would try to convince them that it didn’t matter what they looked like as long as they were confident they could carry any look off. These were smart, funny, original women who didn’t think of themselves as beautiful because they were not supermodels.
Until one day I was speaking to one particular customer from New York. She needed a bikini in one of the larger sizes we made, so I stated my usual line of response “If you want you can cut the tags out and nobody will know what size it is but you.” Most women found this line of reasoning comforting. This woman did not. “Honey” she said “I love myself body size, bullet holes and all, and if someone doesn’t think I am beautiful than they can look the other way!” I was shocked! Someone who was comfortable with who they were. Was I dreaming? It made me so sad that out of the hundreds of calls I received only one person had told me she liked herself! It made me wonder, what is beautiful? Is it a flat stomach and skinny thighs? Well, there are a lot of women with those attributes and it still isn’t good enough for them. I realized that beautiful is not a waist size, beautiful is an attitude. We are all beautiful in our own way, it is us that fails to see it.
Two years ago I lost seventy pounds through diet and exercise. I always thought if I was a size ten instead of a size twenty-four my life would be perfect and all my problems would melt away. Skinny girls have all the fun, right? How wrong I was! Even though I was thinner my problems were still there, so instead of focusing on how I looked in that little black dress I started to focus on how I looked to myself. I looked myself in the mirror every day and told myself, “You are beautiful,” and one day I started to believe it! It was then that those problems started to melt away.
From the executive to the housewife, all women have the same issues, and it makes me wonder … if we as women stopped obsessing about those “last five pounds” and instead focused that energy on something positive, what good we could accomplish! It is our differences that make us unique, and we are all in our own way beautiful. Beauty radiates from the inside out! When I get down on myself, I volunteer for a local cause or donate to charity because I know that I am helping people, which make my insides beautiful. Outer beauty is fleeting, inner beauty lasts a lifetime. Sexy is not a particular body size, it is a state of mind. If you feel attractive, you are.
